Twilight at the Well of Souls

justice.”

They kept him waiting for quite some time and he became very bored. There weren’t many people to talk to, and those who did come in or out were hardly the talkative type. He knew that somewhere in this building they were arguing, discussing, deciding his fate, and that he could do little about it, at least until they made their own moves. He wished terribly that he had a cigar. The Well World was supposed to change you, even make you comfortable in your new form—and it had. A rebirth is only a rebirth, he reflected glumly, but a good cigar is a smoke.

He tried a few of his old dance moves but soon discovered that those, too, were gone for good. Ballet ill- befitted armored tanks.

Finally someone came—not the same one, he decided, who had interviewed him. He was finding it easier to tell individuals apart now, more so as he went along, although he knew that non-Hakazit might have a problem in that direction.

“Thank you for waiting,” the newcomer said pleasantly, as if he had anywhere else to go. “The Supreme Lord will see you now. Follow me.”

He started and almost repeated the title aloud. The supreme lord? Well, no use getting your hopes up too far, Marquoz, he reminded himself. Around here that might be the term for chief palace janitor. These folks looked like they loved titles.

It was soon apparent, though, that this was a personage of considerable rank. Not only the smartly uniformed guards along the hall attested to this, but also the hidden traps, emplacements, and other nastiness that only his trained eye could make out signified rank and importance. Finally he entered a pair of huge, ornate steel doors and found himself in a barren hall. He looked around warily. Yes, television sensors, definitely, and a lot more—but no people. The steel grid he could barely make out under the flooring probably meant the possibilities of instant electrocution should he not meet with the unseen onlooker’s approval. He studied that great set of doors now sliding shut behind him. Some kind of detection system there, too, he noted. Probably x-ray, flouroscope, metal detector— the whole works. One thing beyond the power of this Supreme Lord was dead certain: Whoever and whatever he was, he was scared to death.

Finally he heard a click, as if a speaker had opened, and an electronically colored voice instructed, “You will go to the center of the room, under the large chandelier, and stay very still.” The voice held no menace, just a little suspicion. He did as instructed, and was told to move his tail a little this way or that, shift a bit here or there, until he was wondering if he was posing for a magazine layout. Finally the voice said, “That’s excellent. Now remain perfectly still. You will not be harmed.”

Suddenly he was engulfed in a series of colored beams, some of which felt oddly hot and irritating. That lasted only a few seconds, but it was damned uncomfortable. Even after they were cut off, he tingled uncomfortably.

“Now proceed to the door and enter the audience chamber,” the voice instructed. He looked around, realizing for the first time that an entire wall was silently sliding away. He shrugged and walked into the smaller chamber, which was spartanly furnished with a few tables, some glasses, and little else. The wall slid shut behind him, and he glanced back at it for a moment. Guards, booby traps, steel doors, wired rooms, sliding walls—what else?

What else proved to be a flickering in the air opposite him and the rapid fade-in of a figure much like himself, differing mainly in the fact that this newcomer wore a scarlet tunic and cape trimmed in expensive-looking exotic furs. The Supreme Lord, he knew, appearing as some sort of hologram. What kind of paranoia would sterilize somebody against germs when he was only going to meet a projection?

The Supreme Lord looked him over critically. “Well, I can tell you really are an Entry,” the Hakazit leader snorted. “None of the bowing and scraping or inbred social gestures.”

“For a solidograph?” Marquoz retorted.

The other laughed. “One of my predecessors had people salute his photograph, which was everywhere,” he responded. “He didn’t last long, needless to say.”

Marquoz studied the image, thinking furiously. “So that’s why you take all these precautions? Everybody’s out to bump you off?”

The Supreme Lord roared with laughter. “Now I know you are an Entry!” he laughed. “Such a question! Tell me, how did you come to that conclusion?”

“Most dictators fear assassination,” the Com worlder noted. “It’s not unusual, since they hold power by everybody else’s fear of them.”

The Supreme Lord stopped laughing and looked at the newcomer with interest. “So you know that this is, in fact, a dictatorship? You’re not very much like any Entry I’ve ever heard of before. No, ‘Where am I? What am I doing here?’ and all that. That’s what’s so interesting about you, Marquoz.”

The Entry looked around the room. “Is that why so many security precautions? Because you think there’s something funny about me?”

“Well, no, not really. Not entirely, anyway,” the Supreme Lord replied. “Ah, you call Hakazit a dictatorship. In the purest sense of that term I suppose it is. I flip the intercom, dictate an order, and it is unquestioningly carried out no matter how stupid. And yet—-well, Hakazit is also the most democratic nation on the Well World.”

Marquoz’s head snapped up. “Huh? How’s that?”

“I am fifty-seven years old,” the dictator told him. “Fifty-seven. And do you know how many Supreme Lords there have been in my lifetime? Sixty-seven! And at least one ruled for almost four years. The record according to recent history is nine years, three months, sixteen days, five hours, forty-one minutes. In a history that goes back over a thousand years!”

Marquoz sighed. “It figures,” he muttered. “And that’s despite all this protective stuff, this gimmickry, the best electronics you can devise. I suppose for every charm there’s a counter charm.”

“Exactly,” the Supreme Lord agreed. “Right now there are hundreds of officers trying to figure out how to get to me. One will, one of these days, and then they’ll add me to the books.”

“I’m surprised you don’t know who they are and have them taken care of,” the Entry noted practically. “I know I would.”

The ruler sniggered derisively. “Marquoz, you fail to appreciate the problem. Every Hakazit is doing it. Schoolchildren do it for fun or abstract exercise. Storekeepers, bartenders, you name it. Everybody. You can’t get rid of everybody—then you would have nobody to take dictation.”

“It’s a problem, all right,” Marquoz admitted. “It’s a wonder you’d want this job—or that anybody else would want it under those conditions.”

The Supreme Lord looked puzzled. “But what is the purpose of life if it isn’t to become Supreme Lord? It’s the only thing people have to live for!”

That stopped the newcomer for a moment as he digested the idea. A warrior race with no wars. What’s the result of conquest? The ability to order everybody about, to do anything you wanted, to have anything you wanted. The ultimate fantasy. And that position was here, open, available to anyone, regardless of rank, sex, social position, or authority, who could knock off the reigning leader. It was as crazy an idea as he had ever heard, as nutty a social system as he had ever thought about—and it made absolute, logical sense. That was the trouble. It made sense.

He changed the subject. “Well, one thing has got me curious. Why did you say you had only a thousand years of recorded history? Surely this land and this race are a lot older than that.”

“True,” the other agreed. “But, you see, combat is built into us. We’re the most aggressive race on the Well World, and we’re surrounded by hexes designed to make it impossible to conquer or even reasonably fight them. Radiations lethal only to us, poisons lethal only to us, and the like. We hire some of the people out as mercenaries, guards—even pirates—that kind of thing, to others, but the system has us boxed in. We’re too rational to fight to extinction or maybe fight a war when there’s absolutely nothing to be gained, since we can’t hold what we gain. So, naturally, after a while the system—any system—we create to hold things together here collapses. Civil war, anarchy, a return to barbarism when all the restraints are off. Civilization gets destroyed and has to rebuild again. Our people say any social system lasts an average of two thousand years, so we’re in the middle of a period now. You have no idea how ferocious these social breakdowns can be. And neither do we. After all, they’re so bad that almost nothing survives from the previous age except crumbling ruins and a few relics.”